Killzone: Shadow Fall

If you want to discover some of the neat things your PlayStation 4 can do (and you’re old enough to stomach a little of the old ultraviolence), Guerrilla Games’ sci-fi first-person shooter Killzone: Shadow Fall may be worth dropping into your cart when you go shopping for Sony’s new hardware this Friday.

You’ll get to see some lovely images that show off the box’s graphical potential. I’m talking about sprawling urban vistas that seem to go on forever in perfect clarity and without a hint of pop-up, creating an immense sense of scale simply not possible on current generation consoles. You’ll also witness some of the prettiest light blooming and air particulate effects this reviewer has yet seen in a game.

It’ll give you a good feel for Sony’s DualShock 4 controller, too. You’ll make ample use of its comfortable new sticks and triggers and even get to try that curious touch pad in the centre, which is used here to select operations for a companion drone. Plus, you’ll get to hear the controller’s surprisingly powerful embedded speaker in action as it crackles to life with audiologs found scattered throughout the game.

You’ll even get to try some of PlayStation 4’s much-talked-about social features. Just tap the new Share button and you’ll instantly be able to choose whether you’d like to share the last 15 minutes of game footage you experienced, a single screen shot, or begin live streaming your game to your friends.

But while Killzone: Shadow Fall acts as a nice little showcase PlayStation 4 functionality, don’t expect the game itself to land among the year’s cream of the crop.

Set largely in the capital city of the planet Vekta – home of the assumed good guys in the futuristic war between the Vektans and their deliciously-named rivals the Helghast – Shadow Fall tries hard to tell a tale reflective of our own current geopolitics.

After defeating the Helghast by destroying their home planet, the Vektans have allowed the survivors to come to settle on their world, creating an enormous globe-spanning wall to separate the two deeply conflicted cultures.

Problem is, many Vektan civilians are bitter about having to give up their homes and land to their former enemies, and many Helghast still see the Vektans as their sworn and natural enemies. Suspicion and unease run high, propaganda rules and rallies both sides, and terrorist attacks are common.

Sound like any Earth conflicts you can think of?

It’s well meaning enough, and even kind of interesting in its way (I find the best sci-fi is typically rooted in conflicts and cultural issues to which we can easily relate), but ultimately lacks the strength of writing and character performances to see its ambition through. It feels too hollow and obvious to elicit a legitimate emotional response or foster a sense of narrative immersion.

Plus, our hero – an elite Vektan Shadow Marshal who as a child watched his father get gunned down by Helghast troops during their initial settling on Vekta – just doesn’t have enough presence. His face is rarely seen and his voice is heard seldom. We have too few clues to his inner monologue to make us empathize with him or fully understand his (predictable) crisis of conscience.

Lack of primary character development is a common problem in first-person shooters, but it is felt all the more acutely here given the subject matter, which is clearly striving to be symbolic of the real world.

Before he starts thinking too much about what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, our protagonist carries out covert ops (that frequently turn overt after things go south) on both sides of the wall separating the Helghast and the Vektans. He’s also assigned to look after Vektan off-planet interests in a couple of missions vaguely reminiscent of EA’s Dead Space games.

You can expect small open areas that will afford you some room to strategize, plenty of linear treks through the corridors of slums, ships, and various installations, and even a stealth mission or two (don’t power down when the credits start to roll or you’ll end up missing out on one of the game’s coolest and most satisfying levels).

The shooting action feels similar to its predecessors. There’s still an emphasis on camera shake while moving and jumping, still a broad range of generally satisfying weapons, including the Shadow Marshal’s go-to rifle, which at the touch of a button can physically morph from assault to mid-range sniper mode.

As in previous Killzone games, some weapons still feel a little underpowered, requiring players to pump as much as a full clip into armoured enemies to take them down. But that leaves room for weapons that appear later in the game – including awesomely powerful chainguns and rocket launchers – to really impress with their ability to mow down multiple enemies in a fraction of a second.

I did, however, wonder about some basic design decisions.

For example, players are forced the heat of battle to confirm that it’s okay to pick up a new type of grenade when they run out of his old ones. It’s a waste of precious time. Any grenades are better than none, no?

And while some new mechanics – like an echo-locating device that shows enemy positions through solid objects – prove handy, other more traditional FPS elements – such as objective markers that show direction and distance of current goals but fade away after a few seconds and annoyingly need to be refreshed by tapping a button – have taken a strange step back.

Perhaps the biggest change to the way this Killzone plays comes with the introduction of the OWL, a personal drone that hovers out of sight behind you throughout the game.

It has five very useful abilities selected – slightly awkwardly – by swiping in four different directions on the controller’s touch pad (the fifth, revival, is selected automatically when you bite the bullet).

Attack mode is selected by swiping up. Once selected, just tap the L1 button and your drone will head out and start assaulting enemies in the direction you’re facing. The power of these attacks is a little disappointing — I’m not sure I ever saw the OWL kill an enemy on its own — but it can be useful as a decoy, giving you a chance to change position while your enemies are engaging the drone and flank from the sides.

Swipe left, and the OWL enters stun mode, which gives it the ability to stun enemies and destroy energy shields. I used this function most often. Some of my favourite moments in the game came from me first stunning a group of enemies to make them immobile then tossing in a grenade while running in headlong, spraying lead. Satisfying stuff.

If you swipe down the drone will enter defensive mode and plop down an energy barrier on command that you can fire through but your enemies can’t. I wanted to use this more often than I did. Most levels are designed to push players to keep moving forward, so the idea of standing still for very long – even behind a shield – made me antsy. It seems like it may be a more useful aid in multiplayer (see sidebar below).

The OWL’s most interesting ability, though, might be the zip line. Swipe right and you’ll be able to tap L1 to summon a zip line to pretty much any point in the environment below you. It’s a pretty neat idea that’s required in some areas to traverse long gaps and is available as a strategic option in others, allowing players to descend unnoticed into fortified areas.

All in all, the OWL is a nice addition to the series but feels like a work in progress. I’d have liked to have seen more verticality in level design to facilitate more liberal use of the zipline, and perhaps an under siege scenario or two in which the energy shield became an absolutely essential tactic.

Shadow Fall's middling multiplayer

Killzone: Shadow Fall offers competitive multiplayer in addition to its single player campaign.

I wasn’t able hop online against anyone during my pre-release evaluation period, but I did have a chance to play plenty of matches in the Botzone, which swaps out humans enemies for AI-controlled foes and disables the ability to collect rewards and grow your soldier.

It’s hard to level a verdict on a multiplayer mode without other human players, but I came away feeling as though Guerrilla Games played it pretty safe, perhaps even bordering on humdrum. Game types are common, the three available soldier classes are predictable, and the maps are generally pretty small and without any game changing surprises.

That said, you do get to carry over your OWL drone from the campaign, and I suspect it’s in multiplayer where abilities like the energy shield (which I didn’t use much in solo play) will become more interesting as teams set up their defenses to protect objectives.

We’ll give the multiplayer a whirl when the game goes live and report back here if we discover anything particularly surprising/interesting.

Shadow Fall also stands apart from previous Killzone games by dint of its range of settings – a direct result, I suspect, of Guerrilla Games’ parent company demanding a PlayStation 4 launch game that wowed players with the system’s graphical potential.

Missions set on Vekta show off immense draw distances as well as minute local details, while others set in space around massive ships and above planets confer a sense of the incredible scope its possible to create with Sony’s new hardware.

But it was a mission on Helghan – the Helghast’s home world – that impressed me most (though you need suffer a short, one-off freefall sequence with deeply counter-intuitive controls to get there).

This dead planet, the cities of which are empty and decrepit, is home to random wells of reverse gravity that help keep upright crumbling walls of buildings without any structural foundation. These walls tend to gently waver with each pulse of gravitational energy. It’s a bizarre and discombobulating effect that sent my head spinning.

But I’m pretty sure this was the desired effect. And it’s an effect made possible only by the number of large and multifaceted moving objects that Sony’s next-generation system can process without adversely impacting performance.

One can argue whether or not this eye candy is a boon to the experience on a gaming level, but there’s little question that it helps draw one more deeply into the fantastical world the developers are trying to create. And as a longtime fan of speculative fiction, it makes me excited about the sorts of imaginative worlds that lie in store for us on both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Despite its surprisingly long run (nearly a decade now), Killzone has always felt like Sony’s hasty, belligerent retort to Microsoft’s much more successful Halo – and later Gears of War – franchises.

Shadow Fall, which introduces original mechanics, gear, and settings, and tries to deliver a more grown-up tale, makes it seem as though the series is finally beginning to develop its own distinct personality.

What’s more, it will dazzle players with its next-generation visuals and give them fun things to do with Sony’s newfangled controller.

But when the launch hubbub dies down and you’ve played through your day one bundle of games, this probably isn’t the game you’re going to come back to for seconds.

Killzone: Shadow Fall is fun for what it is – a way to show off PlayStation 4 – but it’s not going to be the sort of hardware-selling exclusive killer app that Sony would have liked for the launch of its new system.